Sword and scale contains adult themes and violence.

It is not intended for all audiences.

Listener discretion is advised.

John says he believed the children were possessed,

and then he did proceed to kill them by stabbing and decapitating the children.

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 74 of Sword and Scale, a show that reveals that the worst didn't just affect a family, but an entire community.

This is the story of three-year-old Julissa Cassada, 14-month-old John Is Stefan Rubio,

and two-month-old Mary Jane Rubio, and a dilapidated building in one of the poorest towns

in the United States, as told by Laura Tillman, author of the book, The Long

Shadow of Small Ghosts, Murder and Memory in an American City. Stay with us. You're a journalist by trade, but this story seems to have really affected you.

Definitely. I think that was one of the things that made me realize that I needed to put myself in the book to some extent was this question of subjectivity and reporting and the way that when you truly become engaged as part of a community, that you're no longer a bystander in the face of something

like this, that you have a stake in it, an emotional stake and a stake in terms of the way that

you want to interact with your community and act toward prevention of violent crimes. So I think that, yeah, it definitely was not your average

story for me. I never have really done that before since in my reporting. How did you first come

across this story? I was a reporter at a newspaper called the Brownsville Herald on the U.S. Mexico border, and it was my first job after college.

And about six months into my time there, I was assigned to write about this local debate over whether this two-story apartment building in downtown Brownsville should be demolished.

It was a dilapidated building,

but it had some historic status because of its age. And so there was this question of whether the demolition would be approved by the city's Heritage Council. And one man, Mark Clark,

voted against demolition. So that was really how I came to the

story was just a simple piece on, you know, whether this building should stay or go. The main

impetus for demolishing the building was because a couple had killed their three young

children there a few years earlier.

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